The day dawned, cold and clear. The frantic activity of packing was over. The trunks were gone, loaded onto the Northern wagons under Damien's watchful eye. My rooms stood barren, echoing every footstep. I was a ghost already, my presence here an anomaly. I had one day left as a student of the Royal Lumina Academy, and it stretched before me, hollow and strange.
I had no heartfelt farewells to make. Elara was a constant, buzzing presence, more a fellow traveler than a connection to this place. There were no close friends, no confidantes. My social circle had been a construct of necessity and Seraphina's malicious curation, and it had dissolved like sugar in poison.
Yet, I could not simply hide in my empty rooms. There were loose ends, formalities, and a strange, perverse desire to walk these halls one last time, not as the girl I had been, but as the woman I was becoming—a figure of wary respect and mystery, as the whispers now had it.
